Defending Ethanol

PARK RIDGE — Your May 12 editorial ``Coddling farmers for dirtier city air`` is a baseless attack on grain-based ethanol and America`s farmers. By no means does ethanol contribute to the haziness of Chicago`s skyline. The bogus volatility (vapor) issue you employed is the same smokescreen used by ethanol`s opponents to cloud the future of this renewable, American-made, alternative fuel.

Tests conducted in St. Louis and New York by the Environmental Protection Agency itself-the very agency now blocking ethanol`s further use-concluded there is ``virtually no change in peak ozone levels for any oxygenated

(ethanol) blend, . . . (a higher vapor) allowance for ethanol blends would not contribute to as significant of a change in ozone levels as the EPA previously thought.``

Ethanol has been proven to reduce ozone (smog) exhaust emissions. It outperforms its chief alternative-methanol-by cutting carbon monoxide emissions by up to 25 percent.

Scientists say ethanol`s lower emission of carbon monoxide, which directly results in less ozone pollution, more than adequately offsets the trumped-up, higher-volatility charge against the corn-based fuel.

Ethanol pumps about 24 cents a bushel into the U.S. corn market. On a typical 500-acre corn farm, that translates to more than $13,000 a year. Nationwide, it would take an additional $1.9 billion in government

expenditures to replace the market-based income provided by ethanol.

Capping it all off is the fact that 30 percent of the methanol used in the U.S. is imported from the Middle East. Surely you do not favor a larger trade imbalance.

EPA, not the Clean Air Act, stands in the way of ethanol. But the agency could right this wrong with the mere recognition of an ethanol volatility allowance already on the books. That would be a simple step to clear air.